The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Some of the greatest challenges my previous ecommerce clients have faced have revolved around developing a cohesive and long-term content/link building strategy. They’ve done all the changes they can on the technical backend of the site, incorporated keywords on the site, created a crawlable internal linking structure, and have paid for PR releases, submitted directory submissions, and written the occasional blog post. Now they ask, what’s next?

The latest Census Report indicates that ecommerce retail revenues are still rising quarter after quarter, meaning there is still boundless potential for the future of ecommerce. In addition, it’s also an exciting time to be involved in SEO as we've begun to realize that now is the time to focus on content marketing, as this is what will distinguish your site from others in the long-term.

The purpose of this post is to outline content and link building ideas, provide information on how your site could go about developing this type of strategy, and real-life examples of ecommerce brands that have implemented these tactics.

Creative Category Pages

Category pages are the money pages for ecommerce sites. Getting links to these pages is a major win because these are the pages that will be ranking for key head and mid-tail terms. Furthermore, even as products are rotated or as the site undergoes a redesign, the category pages will still remain a part of the site architecture and are the pages least likely to be impacted. However, it’s also a major challenge to garner links to these pages. Who wants to link to a page full of products?

Start thinking about how you can redesign your category pages to make them more than just another page. For instance, Hema’s category page was designed to become a wacky Rube Goldberg device. This page has gotten 20,826 links from 2,686 linking root domains.

Using Products as Linkbait

Often times, it can be challenging to revamp or redesign category pages, so that valuable, unique content can be added. If that’s the case, selling interesting products on your site can become an effective form of linkbait.

Threadless sells creative t-shirts. After the homepage, their second most linked to page is this product page. This product page received 5,065 links from 686 linking root domains, 3,068 Facebook Shares, and 1,167 Facebook Likes. It has received links from high authority sites, such as Wired and Boing Boing.

Other examples include:

A robot tea infuser from ModCloth. The page received 789 total links from 201 linking root domains from sites, such as Uncrate and The Next Web.

Tactical duty kilt from 5.11. Although this product started off as an April Fool’s Joke, 5.11 ended up making them because of the demand, while also receiving links from sites, such as Alltop.

Leveraging Sales/Deals Pages

Another linkbuilding tactic is to build and maintain a deals/sales page on the site that fulfills SEO requirements, such as having crawlable, indexable content, static URL, incorporating targeted keywords on the page etc... Then keep the same URL and revamp it every time you have a new deal or sale.

For example, let’s say that your site is giving away really amazing Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. Target mommy bloggers and coupon deal sites and let them know about it. When bloggers report this sale to their readers, they inevitably have to link back to that page. Once the sale is over, keep the page and revamp it whenever new sales/deals come up. Overtime, the link equity on that page can become significant as it garners more and more links.

Sephora has a weekly specials page (that could use a bit more SEO). However, if you take a look at its backlink profile using Open Site Explorer, you’ll notice that the page has received backlinks from different mommy blogger channels.

Personalized Product Giveaways

Think about what makes people feel special. Everyone appreciates personalized gifts. With Mother's Day just around the corner, why not create a care package to the top 50 most passionate moms within your community with a personalized thank you from you and your team? It doesn't have to be expensive to show that you care. Now take the surprise of the care package, combine this with people's insatiable desire to share via Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and they've just published and pinned beautiful photos of this sincere gift to their network for the world to see.

Kotex recently did something similar titled "Women's Inspiration Day". From this campaign, Kotex received an incredible response with almost 100% of the 50 women they sent this gift to posting and pinning this user generated content online, resulting in 2,284 interactions and 694,953 total impressions. This example just goes to show you that sincerity, great execution, and placing something of value perceived value in the hands of your passionate users can pay dividends.

Link-worthy Contests

If personalized product giveaways aren’t possible, consider running effective contests in conjunction with identifying influential individuals on channels using tools, like Followerwonk. This would allow you to systematically target the type of audience and sites you want involved (while also expanding your brand awareness). You need to give something away that people would actually want, especially your target audience. It’s also worth having a little fun with it and seeing if you could come up with some creative tactics that would require contest submissions to link back to your site.

Some possible ideas include:

Fashion/clothing ecommerce sites: Does your boyfriend need a $500 fashion makeover? Send pictures and write a post on the products you would purchase.

Tools/home improvement sites: Shopping spree competition - Does a room in your house need a makeover? How would you spend the money using products from our site?

Value of High-Quality Photos

Who doesn’t like looking at pretty pictures all day? We’re all visually stimulated by beautiful images and so really, it’s worth the effort to incorporate large, high-resolution photos on your site. Not to mention as an ecommerce site, your website is the main vehicle for visitors to take a closer look at the products you offer. If I can’t see the product clearly, why should I buy it from your site? How can I even trust it?

Pictures are also an effective linkbuilding tactic. Fab’s 4th most linked to page on their site is the Fab Inspiration wall. It’s a social mood board so that the community can share inspirational designs with each other. Although the impetus for the creation was to incorporate social sharing on the website, its design speaks volumes about the impact of bold, high-quality photos. Not to mention, the page has received links from Elle and Cool Hunting.

Leveraging Anticipation

There’s something to be said about building anticipation before a product actually hits the market. People are naturally inquisitive and want to be the first to be granted access and try out a product. Think about the huge lines that were outside of Apple stores the day the iPad 3 was released or the anticipation surrounding the release of Diablo 3.

StartupVisual.ly released a teaser preview video about their product before people were allowed to sign up for public beta. When they finally opened the site up, it inspired 60,000 people to sign up for invites and resulted in 8,500 people following their Twitter account.

An ecommerce store that also successfully leveraged anticipation was Bonobos, who are in the business of selling better fitting men’s products. They recently launched a denim line, which expanded their product line from just chinos and cotton pants. The company built a micro site for individuals who wanted to be the first to be notified when the denim product line became live, as well as released a promo video. It was so successful that they ran out of invites! This new product launch received links from Esquire and Dappered, as well as coverage in the WSJ.

Widening Your Audience

Sometimes we become so entrenched in trying to attract our target audience (What’s their persona? Who do they follow? How can I build a relationship with them?), that we can lose sight of all the other potential opportunities that are out there. Brainstorm all the cool things that you’re doing as a company and what your next initiatives are. Can you make any of these into a story? If you can’t think of any, then think outside your site and your target audience and write a blog post that speaks to them.

Often times, companies use their company blog as a way to promote their products. That’s not the purpose of the blog (unless, perhaps, you’re Apple). People aren’t interested that your site has gone through two iterations of redesigns unless it directly affects them. Most don’t care that your new product is now renamed product 2.0 because it went through a minor change and even if they were interested, would they link to it? People want quality, interesting content that makes them go “Wow, that’s kind of neat. I want to share that!” or “(Name of person) would really enjoy this article. I’m going to send it to them now.”

Let’s say your site sells car brakes. Expand your scope, so that your site speaks to not just people who are interested in buying brakes, but into racing or race cars. There are likely more race car aficionados than brake ones. Use tools like Google Insights for Search and Google Alerts to figure out what are some hot trends in racing. Check out forums and learn more about what they’re interested in. Entrench yourself in these conversations by providing value.

This year, Codecademy launched Code Year, an initiative targeted towards individuals who want to learn to code and have made it their New Year’s Resolution. Each week, people who sign up receive a new coding lesson free. It was a massive success as over 400k individuals have signed up to receive these lessons. The designer who designed the Code Year landing page wrote a phenomenal post on how he designed the page in 1 hour. The purpose of the post probably isn’t targeted towards the 400k individuals who signed up, even though they helped make the site a success. I’d like to think it was targeted towards designers or entrepreneurs currently working on their own startup. The blog post received 671 links from 141 linking root domains from sites like Hacker News, Tech Meme, and Reddit.

Think about anything even semi-related to your industry-inspiring buzz or creating amazing products and write really quality content surrounding it (also use this post as a reference) on your site or blog.

If your site doesn’t have its own blog, consider securing guest blog post opportunities, which is still a valuable medium for link prospecting and link building (especially for building links to deeper pages, like category pages). Blog posting also offers opportunities to reach an audience that has not yet heard of your brand. There are tons of outstanding resources available that already provide in-depth detail on how to go about approaching bloggers for guest blog post opportunities.

From an SEO perspective, storytelling attracts links. This video that told the story about a modern day knifemaker who makes his knives by hand attracted links from the NY Times, FastCoDesign, Huffington Post, and Gizmodo to his business site, Cut Brooklyn.

This fantastic video link baitslideshare shows how you can incorporate video into your link building strategy for around $1500. Furthermore, having video instead of just plain text will almost triple the average number of linking root domains.

Taking a Risk and Creating Amazing Content on a Budget

Let’s say you have a limited marketing budget and aren’t sure that you have the resources to create linkbait content. Having such constraints for marketing is normal, but being creative, bold, and taking a risk can still pay off. Take the Dollar Shave Club as an example. With less than $5,000 budget, Dollar Shave Club was able to create a Old Spice like video about their product that led to over 4.5 million views on YouTube, 27,000 Facebook Shares, and over 2,000 tweets. This LA-based startup combined razors, a monthly subscription model, and a video introducing their company to the world with humor as their way to break into the space. Creating content like this isn't without its risks, but when it pays off and is aligned with your core offering, there are many added benefits (brand awareness, growth in revenue, and word-of-mouth).

Audio Content Marketing

Here is another great example of how something as random as a late night Facebook comment manifested itself into a No. 1 Amazon.com selling book almost overnight. Adam Mansbach, author of the children's book for adults titled (kids, cover your ears for this one) "Go the F**k to Sleep" quickly garnered the attention of celebrity Samuel L Jackson to do the narrative once he heard there would be an Audible.com version of the book. It was this combination of interesting, yet unique content narrated by a recognizable voice that transformed Audible.com's sales page into one of the domains top linked, most socially shared, and highest reviewed pages on their site.

Quick stats about this audible page.. It has 8,053 user reviews, received links from 351 linking root domains. The page also received a total of 1,092 Links, 21,900 Facebook Shares, 21,124 Facebook Likes, and 1,902 Tweets.

Utilizing Pinterest

Pinterest has experienced rapid growth over the past 6 months with over 10 million registered users. The power of Pinterest is in its ability to drive referral traffic to your ecommerce site. This type of platform presents an opportunity for ecommerce sites to use Pinterest’s user base as a way to effectively engage targeted users by creating content that is relevant to them, and make its products more visible to the right audience. Ideally, the strategy should be to create compelling and valuable content so that users want to click on the pins and land on various product pages. Colby Almond of 97th Floor has created a Viral Guide to Pinterest Marketing, as well as written additional blog posts that introduce how to effectively build your Pinterest following and create the right type of content for this medium.

Some brands, such as Whole Foods have launched its own Pinterest initiative (which has 28k followers) and use it as a social media channel to represent their core values. They’ve even launched contests, like this “Pins for Mom” one from their account.

Other ecommerce sites, such as Everlane view Pinterest as an opportunity to have its products pinned on different boards. As a result, they’ve incorporated Pinterest’s Pin It functionality on their product pages.

As far as direct SEO benefits are concerned, links from pins and repins are nofollow, as are links that appear in the description.

Lessons Learned When SEO Isn't a Consideration - Honda

Everybody loves a Rube Goldberg machine. They are fun, smart, interesting, and super darn creative. Honda created a Rube Goldberg device crafted out of their car parts called “The Cog”. You know what made this video less cool? The fact that still, to this day, this content is nowhere to be found on any of Honda's websites or YouTube channels. Guess who this did bode well for? A car enthusiast channel known as Web Rides TV with over 3.7 million views and counting. This URL also received links from 582 linking root domains.

Just imagine the lost opportunity Honda had here to capture the links, social mentions, and brand attention to their website and YouTube Channel. When you begin to think creatively and outside the box on how to more effectively leverage different marketing channels (television in this case), don't forget to make SEO a KPI for your campaign and get that link equity flowing back to your website - self-host that video content on your website, post it on your YouTube channel, and do a focused PR push around your campaign that includes a link back to your site page. Finally, don't leave room for others to be the de facto page that comes up when they search for your amazing work and always incorporate SEO within all of your marketing campaigns.

It's Hard Work, But Keep at It

Link building is hard work and results often don’t appear until months after you’ve invested an incredible amount of time and resources. However, these case studies show that it works and even though results appear minimal at the beginning of the curve, results will grow exponentially at the end of the curve. It’s all about constantly pushing the flywheel, working really hard until you get even a hint of momentum, and then continuing to build upon that tiny amount of momentum until it starts to ease up and pushing through becomes easier. Just keep iterating and don’t give up!

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Comments
89

Great list Stephanie, I acutally just had a 2 hour link building brain storm with an ecommerce client and we had like 4 pages of link building ideas come out of the session.

So really I highly advise getting together with clients and brainstroming ideas, becuase you can really work off what they have.

But yeah Pinterest and high Quality video assets are deffiantly a great strategy at the moment, if you can leverage the video content on site and get people to link back to the website rather then your social media assets you will be in the right mind set.

Yes Asad, you need to be wise with the video content even using your own hosting or pages of embedded content via Youtube and then making people link externally to these pages and creating link equity. But yeah my biggest piece of advice is brain storming sessions with key stake holders, I mean you come up with crazy ideas which can in fact work, but the best thing is working out what types of digital assets/comeptition assets and ant thing else you can leverage.

Hi James, you metioned: "pages of embedded content via Youtube and then making people link externally to these pages"!

Can you explain this a bit or share some live example of this? Its not about just embedding youtube video somewhere right? its about creation of a page for youtube and then making people linkback to it? am I getting it right?

Love this! E-commerce is a tough space to be an original content creator in sometimes, especially on sites that carry the same products carried on other sites. I totally needed some fresh ideas so thank you.

Often times you wind up creating a blog and focusing on the content within but this tends to attract page views to your blog which really isn't the main landing strip for a successful e-ecommerce site. I really like your take on Creative Category Pages -- this is exactly where I want to attract attention and page views.

Excellent post some great real world examples that has given me inspiration to find new ways of marketing and building links. Gaining links to ecommerce sites is extremely hard in our experience as it's a commercial site, getting facebook likes are much easier as the button is on the page and one click away, gaining links is a much more extensive task though.

We have totally unique content and photos etc and run a personalised gift site so we could take advantage of the tips above regarding product giveaway!

Fantastic post. The in depth explanations and examples you have used are great. I've got a meeting planned with a large e-commerce site owner in the next few days and this has provided so much assistance in terms of creativity around link building for their site. Great job.

I am little bit disgaree with you because I had made bunch of videos but I didn't get any leads so, how you say that videos attract users and there is a chance to get leads from videos, Rest of tips are good.

It's hard for me to respond to this without seeing the videos you created, so my comment is just an overview of how I feel about videos in general. I'm not saying creating videos will automatically generate leads. I say it has to be a great video, one that serves value, one that people want to share, or one that inspires. There's TONS of videos on YouTube that are not shared or hardly ever viewed. I'd also say that if you were going to create an exceptional video, promote it and make sure people know about it, otherwise how will people find it?

This post is much better than all those over-hyped SEO training projects we can find in the market. Thank you for the tips and everything that you have explained in quite detail here. I have learnt a couple of new things from this post.

These are great ideas and examples. Do you have any advice to convince marketing managers to take risks with creative tactics? The challenge I see is that a lot of managers are concerned with taking any chances with something that may not work or cause a negative reaction. It really depends on the culture of the organization and the company brand. This is one area where smaller companies can have a great advantage by having the flexibility to jump on creative opportunities quickly.

Great question as that's something SEO consultants have to deal with on a daily basis:) It really depends, sometimes you sell them on a vision of where they would like to be in the long-term, sometimes it is based on competitors (if they're doing something amazing, it forces you to take a chance too or if competitors are doing much better than you in terms of number of backlinks, authority of external links and you can't catch up using traditional methods).

Most often, we recommend trying things out to test proof-of-concept. For instance, we want to revamp category pages on an ecommerce site, let's try it with only one category first. If we get results, then we'll try it again on bigger categories. Understand the risks involved and then allocate appropriately, but never risk something you can't afford to lose.

I don't necessarily think small companies have the advantage because they don't have the budget (however, I do agree that for the most part they're willing to take larger risks because they have less to lose).

This is indeed a very good discussion on how to do link building for an e-commerce site. But we would appreciate if you could put more light on what techniques of link building we can use for an e- commerce site.

This is indeed a very good discussion on how to do link building for an e-commerce site. But we would appreciate if you could put more light on what techniques of link building we can use for an e- commerce site.

This is a great article and makes all sense. There is no shortcut on building quality inbound links. It will definitely take time, lots of times, possibly years. There is 1 method which will greatly improve speed, that is have your users especially users who love your brand, create content for you. The way we promote our brand Berricle is offering free product via contest, sweepstakes or offer reward points, coupons, discounts. We tell users to pin or like or bookmark of our products and got many quality inbound links. Some traffic coming from those links even converted to order, isn't it great..I think Google define the level of link quality by amount of traffic (actual users click) and the best if those traffic converted. By having just links alone is not enough these days. Never thought about how to trick Google, always thinks about how to bring actual users traffic. Learn where your competitors got links from. No need to spend hours to get those thinks. Easily available from seomoz.org. You may see hundreds, if not thousands of links. Prioritize them by begin with high domain+page authority.

I want to include these points in your post. Just give me feedback on it that it is fruitful or not?

if we are a new site and do this kind of analysis over our supposed models, with this we can:

1) conduct a better potential audience analysis;
2) discover what our potential audience likes and dislikes in site A, B and C in their Community hacking policies;
3) finding competitive gaps where we can make our own business be positively different respect the older competitors.

This is a very informative post. Actually, I’m very fortunate to be successful in these link-building efforts on my chosen e-commerce sites. I always use my products as Linkbait. Also, I did every tip you’ve mentioned here and I could attest that it really worked. This article could really help fellow marketers. Thanks for sharing this wonderful article.

Great post - completely agree on the value of high quality photographs too, not only is it beneficial in terms of link-building, but when we replaced the photos on our client's e-commerce site with much more creative / high quality pics, we saw the conversion rate increase by over 20%.

Super helpful article. We are trying to enhance brand engagement with our users on Boombotix (http://boombotix.com). We are going to use Instagram as the platform for our users to create picture content on there and encourage them to tell stories. Our product (portable speakers) is all about life in motion, so we thought it would be relevant to encourage users (or prospective users) to generate content around their own lifestyle. We are also gamifying the experience to enhance the virality of it and reward users that are most active...imagine KarmaLoop built off Instagram with a dash of Wordpress.

As said in this article, it could take a lot of time to build on our own, but when you really think about leveraging the community at your brand's fingertips, then you can really accelerate the path to hocket stick growth...and hopefully you have the conversion rates to make your business kick ass.

Another wishful way of link building. Goodluck doing all these when you work as an in house SEO for a large company when changing simple text on a site takes forever and needs to go through multipel layer of audit and approval.

With all do respect, this type of link building tactics are like communism. Sound great in theory but in real life just not practical at all for 99% of companies out there.

Great post, Stephanie, and provided some very good ideas. I started off think ecommerce would be a difficult one, but this shows some good ideas (and examples where it worked). Very inspirational. Thanks.

You have shared 50+ great external source to understand more. Honestly, that makes my day. Now, I have lot of reading material and future action plan for my eCommerce site.

Product pages are quite interesting which you have shared. But, what about user generated content on product pages like reviews, comments, feedback or Q & A. Why shoul I focus more on this factor? Because, sometime it's quite hard to establish unique and rock solid content on each and every product page. I'm working on eCommerce website (Vista Stores) & have 10K + product pages. If we're talking about social sharing and on page so, we have done almost over there.

Now, I have big question to expand view of my product pages with long trail keywords? Unique and fantastic content will help me. That I know. But, Can I invest that mush $$$ on initial bases? Because, I'm talking about that kind of eCommerce website who are on track to establish big reputation and brand.What you think about it?

Hmm..I view adding reviews, comments, feedback, and Q&A as adding more unique content to the page. Many times, ecommerce sites have duplicate product descriptions and even products, which can affect the likelihood of these pages ranking. However, I'd be hardpressed to think that this type of content is linkworthy (though glad to be proven wrong).

Also, I think you misunderstood the creative content on product page portion. I'm not at all saying that every product page has to be exciting because that's unrealistic. However, if you're hoping to gain brand recognition and create an opportunity to get more overall external links to your site, then this is something worth considering. Furthermore, I don't think it is an effective use of time/resources to do this for all product pages because honestly, product pages rotate and sell out.

Why I want to drill down more on this topic? I have realistic example to give answer. I'm working on this landing page. There are 729 visits in 2012 ~January to April. But, eCommerce conversion rate is 0.00%. If we are talking about organic performance with targeted keyword so, my landing page is on 11th position with Patio Umbrellas keyword. Now, I'm looking forward to achieve top 5 ranking. I have too many questions for it. How? How? How? Because, top 10 competitors have rock solid detailing on each product pages. Does it really matter to improve product page quality to achieve high ranking with category page?

Your reply make sense for me. But, I want to double check each and every aspects which help me to design best eCommerce site. BTW: Thanks for your reply!

Nice site, product pages are a bit noisy... many distractions...can hurt conversion. Still learning, still building but one thing I learned for sure. There should be ONE star on the product page. The product.

Those are appropriately placed. Just my opinion and I might be wrong, you may even know a lot more than me. I was getting very few visits, have a job and no time for Seo and sought to convert. One thing I learned was cut, cut, cut cut; reduce buttons, make logos smaller, reduce colors, get rid of large headings, shove unecessaries to the bottom, the product must be the ONLY game in town. I have books that helped. Haven't implemented half the stuff I learned but in time I will. Might be unfair to the competition, just kidding. :-).

the only downside to this is to realize how many opportunities many companies are missing. Sometimes it's so simple to add something magical into everyday work. Problem is people sometimes are not willing to risk and, unless you are a "big guy" , you cannot decide yourself what to do and to implement ideas in the site.

People are afraid to experiment, people are afraid to risk. that's the biggest problem.

Woot! Thanks for shouting my SMX Munich presentation - Jackie did an amazing writeup on State of Search (it was so good it made it kinda pointless for me to write it up on SEOgadget!) highly recomended:

This is great Stephanie, just got a new ecommerce client and really had to explain how they shouid be doing things in the budget and time constraints! Pinterest is great and iots of marketing opportunities happening there..

Page for a product on E-commerce website with high quality photos taken from all the angles, a video that show how to use and special features, people reviews, social share buttons, display price but in discounted way or with surprise factor and that's it, your e-commerce website ready to go on the floor. So many people have written on this topic. This is definitely best !

Very inspiring and useful post Stephanie - good job! I agree with the fact that e-commerce are one of the hardest type of websites for leveraging a succesful long term SEO strategy. It's going to take alot of creativity, since you have two hard things to do - optimize the product pages for sales and at the same time making your pages linkworthy. Just be creative enough, try out different methods on different pages and it'll work out!

We are in the process of creating our own Pinterest competition together with a blog we sponsor that will require entrants to pin images/products from both sites on to specially created boards within Pinterest. A great way to get pins directly from your site (plus we are hoping it has a viral effect). Much like ASOS recently did.

Very Nice post stephanie, E-commerce sites can prove to be gold mines if its optimized in a proper way as you have shown here. Worth sharing, you got a thumb up and a +1 here. Worth reading for everyone dealing with ecommerce sites!

You are right unless you are creative enough to show your product in public and deal with your pages a little different from most of the websites, there is no point for people to link to a page fulll of products and nothing special!

I like two ideas that almost every Ecommerce website can go with and that is the addition of Pinterest button on Images (off course you have to go with high quality images if you want to win the game).

And the use of special page for deals and stuff, usually bloggers and other magazines are likely to link to pages that offer special discounts and deals on special occasions.

"I must say, if you use Pinterest button over your e-commerce products, then it might be useful for your website and businnes. Users mostly buy products from Pinterest rather than e-commerce; which is the reason Pinterest's growth recently."

Great ideas... E-commerce is often very challenging, and everyone probably thinks their particular niche is even more challenging than other e-commerce niches. The key is to be creative, which can be harder for business-minded thinkers than those with a more artistic flair, so it's always helpful and encouraging to read ideas and execution from others in the e-commerce space.

Excellent post Stephanie! I totally agree that brainstorming with key people is a fantastic way to come up with ideas. Its also handy to have half an eye on what targets like to share and link to so that you don't waste too much time going off at a tangent. Its much easier to match what is possible with what people want slightly earlier in the process and before you spend time creating the awesome content.

When you put your mind to it there seem to be endless possibilties no matter what the product or service, its just a case of getting creative!

...yet again, do something amazing, that's better then the way everyone else is doing it, and you'll get links. The longer I'm involved in this industy, the more it becomes obvious that link building is more about great content then anything else.

Yes, a subtle one that was inserted, but one that could work really well if implemented correctly. You might want to create a special discount code for anyone who just views the shopping spree competition (even if they're not directly participating, although technically they are by just reading about the competition ;)) Plus you can track conversions from the code to see which blog performed the best and analyze the results (this could help you figure out your ideal target audience if you were ever to do another contest).

Fantastic post, some of the ideas (Pinterest) we've floated under ecommerce client's noses already... gaining links from mommy bloggers for offers/sales pages - top idea, though I guess we have to be careful to ensure our clients keep their offers fresh and up-to-date.

One technique we use for clients with "boring" products is to generate a story and a great way to do that is to find out if that client takes part in charity events (rather than actually just raise money, they take part in the event itself) When they take part they generate a story (i.e. the training, the actual event, the aftermath, funds raised, targets met etc) - this has been a useful way to generate links, we even got a Follow link (though non-anchor text) out of a leading UK based Global brand.

Creating sales pages is a great idea. You keep the SEO value of that page (age, search engine trust, links, etc) but just update the content to the latest sales/promotions. You don't have to strart from scratch each time.

I think my favorite part of the post was regarding personalized product giveaways. People are always hesitant to give away product, but usually the ROI is enormous. We also use personal stories to talk to potential customers. Sometimes all it take is for them to identifiy with the people in the story, and they are ready to buy!

Supportive of the initiative, but their name is Codecademy and not Code Academy. I am a co-founder of Code Academy (http://codeacademy.org) in Chicago, and we have created a physical program that teaches beginners how to build web applications. If you could correct your post that would be great. Thanks!

Great examples. But the real world of SEO people (agency or in-house) being able to influence creative/UX to the extent of awesome content is hard and rare. I think many of these examples are accidental successes in SEO. They were more likely just trying to stand out and get social recognition. That translates to SEO, but I doubt SEO folks can instigate such productions from the onset. SEO folks tend to fall back on things they can do alone and only alone - asking for/buying links since the control is in their hands.

This is purely social viral marketing, not SEO. Links alone aren't the best SEO, but links for specific keywords. For examples, the Threadless page really has mostly brand, product name and misc anchor text in backlinks. There are some "tshirt" backlinks, which helps the site as a whole, but that page does not rank for tshirts. Nor does it for "star wars tshirt". There is no content on the page. It really isn't a good page except is a kick-ass creative idea, and luckily garnered links from star wars geeks, movie buffs and Huffington Post readers with nothing better to do than share web pages all day.

I respectfully disagree. I've worked at 2 SEO agencies and have worked on many sites across all verticals and across all budgets, so I relate to the difficulties of implementing these recommendations.

The interesting thing is at Distilled, we still recommend basic SEO recommendations to all our clients, but more and more frequently, my clients are coming to me asking for help integrating their different marketing channels (I speak with their PR team, their content team, their social team, etc...). I even have clients that are family businesses and don't have a marketing or dev team. Currently one of my clients is a family business with no marketing department and a very small budget. Yet, we're still coming up with a content strategy and implementing CRO for their site because they're invested in the long-term. It's all about striking a balance.

Yes, you still need targeted anchor text, but how many can you build in a day? With Google getting aggressive with over-optimization and link networks (and rightfully, so), I think it is worth the investment to really provide valuable content that is shareable. I also think that more and more, we're integrating SEO with other channels (like social). Why not - it's more effective and more cohesive.

Also, can we really say for sure these are "accidental successes"? Yes, some may be, but the fact that we're not really sure means "Wow, SEO can actually look really organic" and that's a good thing.

Stephanie, I could not agree more. SEO is dead, long live Inbound Marketing :P

In all seriousness, this is where we are headed. In order to survive in the new order you are either going to have to intergrate your services with Social, PR, etc. or become so specialized (and so good at your specialty) that you only do one small thing.

This integration is a good thing, because it means that everyone is working in synchronicity. Being on the same wavelength ensures that everyone knows the KPI's and the plan to reach goals. Less pointing fingers, more raising glasses!

Great post Stephanie,very informative.Thank-you. As i'm new to S.E.O i want to ask that

Is it a good strategy to put someone's articles on your blogs? I just want to know if it is ok if I just copy someone's article about anything to my blog then just put who did it and their links along with my link too ?